this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
733 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
12 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 63 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Signal refusing to federate with WhatsApp, even though meta says they will still use the signal protocol is the most bone headed decision I have ever seen from them.

There no better chance to break the network effect than this.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Meta could easily have the WhatsApp client upload decryption keys to their servers without any notification to the user.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it's own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the line protocol. Each client has encryption key pairs. The public key of the first party shares it with the other parties, and vice versa. If it's encrypted with the public key then the private key can decrypt it.

If Meta gets the private keys, they can decrypt any message they want independent of whatever protocol is being used.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

But aren't these key pairs generated per session and/or per contact? So once you switch to a more secure / auditable client this only matters when communicating with people on whatsapp. But they presumably have a backdoor in their app for the NSA anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

No body said it's going to have the same level of security, but that still doesn't mean that should just give up on it, just put a small icon indicating this is a WhatsApp user.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

Yeah that sucks, Signal is my preferred app and I wish I could get rid of WhatsApp without having to convert everyone.